Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

A silence overtook the Cervix. I could hear nothing but the sound of my Xanax bottle being instinctually opened by three of my benumbed fingers, and then the scratch of the white pill descending my dry throat. We absorbed the Images and as a group of like-incomed people felt the short bursts of existential fear. That fear was temporarily replaced by a surge of empathy for those who were nominally our fellow New Yorkers. What was it like to be one of the dead or the about-to-be-dead? To be strafed from above in the middle of a city? To receive the quick understanding that your family was dying around you? Finally, the fear and the empathy were replaced by a different knowledge. The knowledge that it wouldn’t happen to us. That what we were witnessing was not terrorism. That we were of good stock. That these bullets would discriminate.

I teened Nettie Fine: “Did you see what’s happening in the park????”

Despite the time difference in Rome (it must have been past 4 a.m.), she teened me back immediately: “Just saw it. Don’t worry, Lenny. This is horrible, but it will BACKFIRE on Rubenstein and his ilk. They’re shooting in Central Park because there aren’t enough ex-National Guardsmen there. They’ll never go after the former soldiers. The real action is in Tompkins Square, which Media isn’t covering at all. You have to go there and meet my friend David Lorring. I used to do post-traumatic counseling in D.C. and he came to see me after two tours in Ciudad Bolívar. He’s organizing a real resistance down there. Brilliant guy. Okay, I got to catch some zzzzz’s, sweetie. Stay strong! xxx Nettie Fine. P.S. I follow your friend Noah Weinberg’s stream religiously. When I’m back in the States I’d love to take him out to lunch.”

I smiled when I read Nettie’s missive. A woman in her sixties was still active, still trying to shape our country in the right way. Surely there was some hope. As if to confirm my thoughts, CrisisNet pinged with a new announcement: “LIBOR RATE RISES 32 BASIS POINTS; DOLLAR HIGHER BY 0.8% AGAINST YUAN AT 1¥ = $4.92.” Could the markets be right? Was the Central Park massacre really a turning point? Would it backfire on Rubenstein and his friends?

I re-read Nettie Fine’s message. It was inspiring, but there was something off about the wording. The real action is in Tompkins Square . I tried to picture the words “real action” leaving Nettie’s careful, intelligent lips. What had happened to her? The otter . I teened Fabrizia in Rome. “RECIPIENT DELETED.” Okay, I had to stop worrying. There was a real massacre in front of me. Forget the Old World. I was not responsible for what happened to either Nettie or Fabrizia. I was responsible only for Eunice Park.

Meanwhile, at the Cervix, the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales. All I remember is feeling a little hot around the temples and wanting to be closer to Euny. Things had been rocky between us since I had relapsed and picked up a book, and she had caught me reading, not just text-scanning for data. With the violence just a few miles to our north, I wanted nothing to separate me from my sweetheart, certainly not a two-brick tome of Tolstoy’s W amp;P .

Noah started streaming right away, but his girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, was already live. She lifted up her blouse to show the negligible roll of fat that crowned her perfect legs and spilled from her perfect jeans, her so-called muffintop , slapped at it, and delivered her signature line: “Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?”

“It’s Rubenstein time in Central Park,” Noah was saying. “It’s Harm Reduction, giving away the store, everything must go, ‘our prices are insane’ time in America, and R-stein won’t feel good until all the niggers and spics are cleared out of our city. He’s dropping bombs on our moms like Chrissy Columbus dropped germs on the redman, cabróns . First the shooting, then the roundup. Half the mamis and papis in the city are going to end up in a Secure Screening Facility in Utica before the week is over. Better keep your äppäräti away from those Credit Poles…” He paused to look over the raw data streaming at him. And then he turned his tired, professionally animated face to us, unsure of what emotion to muster next but unable to contain the visceral thrill. “There’s eighteen people dead,” he said, as if he had surprised himself. “They shot eighteen.”

And I wondered about the excitement in his voice: What if Noah was secretly pleased that all this was happening? What if we all were? What if the violence was actually channeling our collective fear into a kind of momentary clarity, the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association? I could already envision myself excitedly proclaiming the news of how I had seen this dead Aziz bus driver in Central Park, had maybe even exchanged a smile with him or an urban whassup . Don’t get me wrong, I felt the horror too, but I wondered, for instance, what were these Secure Screening Facilities that Noah always talked about? Were people really shot in the back of the head without a trial? Once, I reminded Noah about how The New York Lifestyle Times used to have actual correspondents who would go out and report and verify, but he just gave me one of those “Old man, don’t even ,” looks and went back to hollering Spanish slang into his camera nozzle. But, then again, Nettie Fine followed his stream religiously , so maybe I was missing something. Maybe Noah was as good as it got these days.

“Eighteen people dead!” Amy Greenberg was shouting. She put her hand on her make-believe muffintop, over the negligible waistline and the pretty serious musculature above, as if to scold Rubenstein and the administration, but this maneuver also allowed the outline of her left breast-which a random poll had publicly declared to be the better one-to spill out of her décolletage and frame the center of the shot. “Huge riot in Central Park, National Guard just shooting everyone, smashing up their little shacks, and I am so glad my man Noah Weinberg is right over my shoulder, because I just cannot handle this anymore . I mean, hello, stop me before I snack again. Noah, I am so blessed to have you in my life at this terrible moment, and I know I’m not perfect, but, okay, and this is like total cliché alert , but you mean the world to me, because you are so kind and sensitive and man-hot, you are so Media, and”-her voice started to shake, she started to blink voluntarily in a way that always hastened the tears-“I don’t know how you can go out with a fat loser like me.”

Grace and Vishnu were leaning in to each other as if they were two parts of an ancient ruin, while new death tolls appeared in the air around us, the numbers swelling. I recalled Point No. 4, Care for Your Friends, and again my friends were the ones who took care of me . Noticing me standing alone next to Eunice, who was deep into AssLuxury (was she too shocked by the violence to stop shopping?), they reached out and brought me into their circle, so that I could feel the warmth of their hands and the boozy comfort of their breath.

Noah and Amy were loudly streaming a few feet apart from each other, straining to be heard over the din of the bar.

“Rubenstein’s making a point to Li,” Noah was saying. “We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we’re not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we’ll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. Keep the credit rolling, chinos .”